


Unthinkable

by Kastaka



Category: Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
Genre: Gen, References to Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 14:26:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/598789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kastaka/pseuds/Kastaka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being left Standing - it gets easier, and it doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unthinkable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [astrokath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrokath/gifts).



> With thanks to Mirrorshy for beta-ing :-)

"It's okay, it's okay," she murmurs, over and over, as she holds Jarella awkwardly in her arms.

The foster mother, Marri, hovers nervously in the background. But Marri had never shown any interest in the Sands; she wouldn't understand the desolation of being left Standing.

Tarella would love to say that she remembers it as clear as day.

But she knows that her memories have mixed themselves with each other. The brief moment of bright darkness as the white robe went over her head; the humming of the dragons that thrummed right through her; the fear and the heat and the sand.

And, of course, the beautiful moment when their eyes met - but that had not been her first experience. Once she had been here, crying into her mother's arms, convinced she would never be found worthy.

"It's okay," she repeats. "Hardly anyone Impresses at their first Hatching. It took me five; your grandmother took eight."

The unmistakable clicking of claw on stone, from behind them; she can feel Serrath approaching cautiously, eyes whirling gently in concern, wondering how she can help.

_It's okay,_ she echoes in her mind. _I just need to comfort Jarella, that's all._

The dragon draws closer, oblivious to the way that Marri shrinks slightly away. Her soft breath ruffles Jarella's hair, and the girl redoubles her sobbing.

_Maybe you should be somewhere else,_ Tarella advises her, with some reluctance.

_But you are upset,_ Serrath protests. _And your hatchling is upset._

_Yes,_ admits Tarella, stroking Jarella's hair in a fashion that she hopes is comforting. She remembers being comforted by the gesture herself, anyway; now, it just seems to intensify the girl's sobbing. _But she's upset because there wasn't a dragon for her on the sands, so having another dragon around is maybe not the best thing right now?_

_Why is she looking for a dragon?_ Serrath asks, confused.

_Why wouldn't she be, dear heart?_ asks Tarella. _Why would anyone not want what we have?_

_Because not everyone is right for dragons,_ Serrath tries to explain. _I love your hatchling, because she's yours. But she doesn't smell right._

Tarella tenses for a moment, freezes; looks down at her daughter, who is vigorously drying her eyes and wiping her nose on the sleeve of her dusty white robe. Preoccupied, her daughter doesn't even seem to notice.

_Are you sure?_ replies Tarella, instinctively protective.

_I..._ tries Serrath. _I can't be sure. Of course I can't be sure. You shouldn't worry about it. It will probably all be fine. She just needs to grow some more, that's all._

Tarella is about to question her dragon further, to try to work out whether Serrath is just saying the words she thinks will make her rider feel better, but then Jarella looks up at her with damp, determined eyes, and the thought is dashed from her mind.

"It's okay," repeats Jarella, still with a rough edge from the tears. "I know... I know really... it's just hard to, when you see it, when you see it so close..."

She sniffs and blinks, keeping the tears at bay.

"But I know," she repeats. "They told us over and over in candidate classes. It doesn't mean that there isn't a dragon for me. It just means that she isn't hatched yet."

Helplessly, Tarella nods. It seems to be the right answer. She moves a hand to run her fingers through Jarella's curly brown tresses again, then thinks better of it; that didn't work out so well last time. Instead, her hand raises and falls, uselessly.

_Thank Faranth for foster mothers,_ she thinks, aimlessly. She hadn't known what to do with the little bundle of life when it first tore itself painfully out of her, and she still really isn’t sure how one was meant to somehow grow such things into functional human beings.

Fortunately, Marri seems to have done an excellent job.

\----

Marri has been around dragons all her life; it's an occupational hazard of living in the Weyr; she wouldn't trade her home, her chosen occupation, for the world.

"You've been very brave," she tells Jarella, as they walk away from her mother and her mother's dragon.

"Did you ever Stand?" Jarella asks her, all lit up once again with the cheerful curiosity that usually occupied her features.

"No," admits Marri. "I... they didn't really need more girls, and I've always loved children... you don't get time to be a foster mother, or anything else, if you have a dragon to look after."

"Isn't a hatchling a bit like a child?" she asks, innocently, with those searching brown eyes of hers.

Despite her long practice at keeping her unflappable face on around her charges, Marri can't quite suppress a tiny shudder. Jarella's face immediately falls into a pattern of querulous concern.

"Not really," Marri settles on, eventually. "I mean, and they grow up so fast! Soon they're not much like children at all."

"You don't like dragons, do you?"

Marri swallows nervously. She does not want to be having this conversation. It is not a thing that you do, in a Weyr, not liking dragons. It is certainly not a thing that you admit.

"It's okay," Jarella says, when no response is forthcoming. "I mean." She is beginning to look unhappy again - but this time in an awkward, nervous fashion that mirrors Marri's discomfort. "If..." she continues, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "If I didn't like dragons either, it would make it easier, wouldn't it?"

"Easier not to get one, perhaps," replies Marri, in what she hopes is a reassuring tone. "But easier in general?"

"No, I suppose not," replies Jarella, oddly subdued.

\----

It does, and it doesn't, get any easier.

The worst thing is not the new dragonriders, the ones who have succeeded. Their eyes fill with so much love, with so much wonder; but she knows from Marri that there are other loves, that the world is full of wonder, if you know where to look.

The worst thing is not the endless repetition, the classes that she has heard a hundred times, the chores that the candidates do because there is no point teaching them anything else, is there? Some of the older candidates become apprentice dragonhealers - but she does not want to take up a trade that she could not reasonably continue, when, if...

No. It's still unthinkable.

The worst thing is not the other candidates, the endless procession of new faces, some new to the Weyr and fearful of the strange culture that they find there, some the other children of riders both established here and transferred in - even though, as the years go by, some shun her as if her lack of success might be infectious.

The worst thing is her mother. She would have long since stopped crying, afterwards, if it wasn't for the look on her mother's face when she had first left the Sands dry-eyed. She had even asked, in so many words.

"Do you not want to be a dragonrider?"

Jarella had assumed that it was meant to be a way out. That it was meant to be part of a speech which said, "I won't think any less of you," which said, "you're still my daughter and I love you". But she could tell that her mother did not really understand the strange creature she had brought into the world, and that she hoped that having a dragon would make her more explicable, more relatable.

And that all those fine words that Tarella had prepared would be lies, and they would drift apart, and they would never really be people to each other.

So she had reassured her - "No, no, I..." and let the tears flood in - and let her grief at that distance fill in for her supposed grief at her continued lack of a partner for life.

But more and more it seems like that decision is killing her mother, or is going to kill her. And Jarella does not need to use that phrase lightly, because she lives in a Weyr during a Pass and she has seen death, and she can see that her mother is distracted. That her relationship with her dragon, Jarella realises as she grows into her adulthood, is strained somehow.

And that kind of thing can cost lives in the air, in the Fall.

Of course, it would all go away if she could Impress; if she could find a dragon that thought she was worthy. So she applies herself assiduously to her studies; to her exercises; to increasingly strange and superstitious methods.

She gets caught sneaking into the Hatching Caverns to touch the eggs, in a little knot of candidates who have dared each other. She smuggles a green sash onto the Sands with her and waves it to attract the hatchlings' attention.

She is escorted off the Sands in her seventeenth year, for attempting to help open an egg that was having trouble hatching. The tiny, stumbling green hatchling inside chooses another girl, but its wings never form properly and it dies half a year later; and so does the girl, throwing herself from the fire-heights in the dead of night.

\----

No-one really blames her for the death, of course; except they do.

The legend sticks to her, if not the actual culpability. She's already considered bad luck, to be standing so many years. Now she might be bad luck even to those who do manage to Impress. She tells herself that she likes it that way. That she doesn't want to get close to people who will inevitably leave her for their dragons.

"You should learn a trade," Marri says, every time they meet. "I worry about you. Some people like the life of a wife, or mother, or kitchen worker, but I'm not sure that's the path for you - and you're not leaving yourself many other choices."

But there are no other choices.

The Hatchings merge into each other - fewer now, she thinks, than when she first stepped out onto the Sands, and fewer eggs in each, too. Much rarer for there to be a cluster of girls around a larger, separated egg that might give them a chance at real authority one day. There are whispers, she knows, that maybe - now that there is not so much need, now that there are not so many hatchlings - girls should not be on the Sands at all.

And then - there it is.

Coming in from the horizon, like an onrushing wherry.

Her twentieth birthingday.

She knows that golden hatchlings have a mind of their own on these matters, have been paired with candidates up to another four or so years older; but there are fewer of those, and in any case, the wings she has always dreamt of are green.

There were a few more restrictions on walking the fire-heights, during the months after the ex-weyrling's death, but over the following couple of years they have weakened. Still, Marri notices, when she begins to visit the high places.

There are plenty of people who would counsel her, now, people whose job it is to transition unsuccessful candidates to another life.

"Now," says the weyrlingmaster, a middle-aged man who rides an equally middle-aged brown dragon. "Some craft-halls won't take you beyond the age of fifteen or so, but others are less choosy - especially for women, who often take a little longer to convince their families. There are still plenty of opportunities out there for a bright young lass."

But there are no opportunities.

After another unsuccessful Hatching; another round of empty tears on her mother's shoulder, the only time when Tarella will embrace her; the weyrlingmaster approaches her.

"Jarella," he says, kindly. "I know that you've had your heart set on... this. But you can't keep doing this to yourself. We can't keep doing this to you."

"You can't keep letting me Stand when there isn't a gold on the Sands," she says. "Because that would mean you weren't enforcing the age rules, and that would mean all the twenty-something hopefuls - plus the runaway brides who have decided they've had enough of their husbands, and goodness knows who else who would usually be excluded - showing up at your office door to demand to take their chances."

It comes out strangely flat, like it's a speech she has rehearsed; like it's meaningless, because everything is meaningless. Like she shouldn't have to be explaining this to him, to prove that she knows what he knows, that it isn't personal, that it isn't _his fault._

It is hideously and terribly unfair that she has to consider his feelings in this matter. But Marri has taught her well; and so she does.

"I'm glad you understand," he says, relieved. Relieved of his duty; relieved of his obligations. "I don't suppose you've given any thought to..."

But she has already turned and begun to walk away, and although for a moment it looks like he is thinking of chasing her, he thinks better of it. He lets her go.

\----

Up on the fire-heights, she finds Marri.

"I thought I might find you here," she says. She doesn't even try to hide that she was looking for her like she had so many times before; didn't try to make out that it was coincidence, like all the times before, when their paths have just 'happened' to cross.

"What are you going to do?" asks Jarella. She finds, to her surprise, that she is genuinely curious; although it is the curiosity of detached study, not the anger or the fear or the pain that she thinks she should be feeling.

"Talk to you," says Marri. "I mean. Stop you, I hope. Keep you here. Keep you safe."

"You're not my mother, Marri." She thinks there should be venom behind it; she knows that form of words is one that she would usually intend to wound. But there is no venom left in her; she is dry, dry as crack-dust, about to float away in the breeze.

"I didn't bear you," says Marri, cautiously, "it is true. But I did raise you. And I do care about you - mother or no..."

"You care about your reputation," claims Jarella, disinterested, answering by rote; maybe the baseless accusation will throw her off guard, let Jarella dispense with this conversation and be about her business. "You care about your performance - about how well you did. You did well, Marri. You did as well as you were able. It's me that's defective. It's not your fault. But the dragons can tell."

Marri doesn't know what to say. She has considered her arguments thoroughly before coming up here; how it's not too late to learn a new trade, how Jarella sings beautifully in the dining caverns when she thinks no-one can hear her above the entertainment, how she used to love drawing.

She hadn't considered needing to protest her own case, that her care for her charges was more than just a job to her.

But there is nothing she can say against the blankness in Jarella's eyes.

"You're sick," she says, awkwardly. "You need help. The healers can..."

"The healers can make someone else out of me, maybe," says Jarella. "They can say how sorry they are and they can stick herbs down my throat until they find something that makes me compliant. But, Marri... maybe you'll miss me, but you're the only one. And you have plenty of other children. Can't you find your personal fulfilment in them, and leave me alone?"

"They'll be upset anyway," Marri finds herself blurting out, even though she knows immediately that it's the wrong thing to say.

"Good," says Jarella, with more emotion than anything else she has said; with a tombstone finality, echoing down onto the conversation. "Let them be upset. Marri, they'll enjoy it. Everyone loves a tragedy. Something to cry prettily about; something to comfort each other about; something to commiserate with their dragons..."

"Your mother will be upset," tries Marri, knowing that she is clutching at straws.

Finally, something breaks in Jarella's impassive face. She angrily blinks away the tears that she had thought were all cried out, in her mother's arms.

"My mother never wanted me," she whispers, her voice cracking with the effort of keeping the tears away. "She'll be confused, maybe. Disoriented, for a few moments. She'll wonder what she could have done differently. But really? She'll be relieved. She never knew what to do with me. Now she won't have to worry any more. I've always been an inconvenience to her; without me, she can get on with her life."

Jarella turns away; steps confidently towards the edge. Marri watches the distance between them, helpless. She could lunge forwards, turn this into a physical struggle; but Jarella is young and lithe and healthy, and Marri is older and careworn. And... there are the other children to think of. If she struggles with Jarella, they might both go over.

"Not going to launch any last-minute rescue attempts?" Jarella asks her, softly, from the very brink.

Marri isn't crying. She doesn't know why. The world feels very small and very distant.

"Would it help?" she asks. "Would you thank me?"

"No," says Jarella, and she takes two swift steps, too fast to follow, into the air.

\----

"When someone is falling, match speed with them, if you can. It's better to catch them than not, but they can still hurt themselves badly, especially if you're rising to meet them."

Her wingleader's advice has proven useful time and time again in the air, in the chaos of Threadfall, when a rider's straps have been eaten through, when some desperate manoever separates them from their dragon and sends them tumbling through the empty skies.

And so she takes the time, although every instinct screams against it, to fall as her daughter falls, before Serrath soars in underneath the wayward girl and brings her gently and safely to rest.

Entirely unresisting, Jarella feels her mother's firm grasp close around her, drawing her into a seated position. She can’t quite believe this is happening. Maybe it isn't; maybe this is just what the mind does, in the moment of death.

But as it goes on - as Tarella gently brings Serrath down to the ground, without a word, because what can she say - she gradually begins to accept it. Even if it is her mind playing tricks on her, she couldn't possibly tell the difference - so what difference did it really make?

As Tarella climbs down, and turns back to face her daughter, Jarella looks at her with wide eyes sparkling with the beginning of tears: _why did you do that? how did you know?_

Then, a hard line of suspicion: _did Marri tell you?_

But no - that was crazy. Marri isn't that good an actor. She wouldn't have reacted like she had, if she had known that Tarella was waiting to bear her daughter to safety. Marri. She still didn't know...

"We have to tell Marri," are Jarella's first words to her mother, as Tarella silently unbuckles her.

"We have to leave you in the care of the healers," her mother replies, her eyes burning with an unfamiliar fire. Gradually, Jarella realises. Tarella's eyes are burning with anger. She's never seen her mother angry with her before.

She bows her head, unsure of how to proceed.

"I will go and tell her," Tarella says, "as soon as you are out of danger."

"Tare.... Mother," says Jarella, looking hopeful, serious, a more honest set of expressions than she has used with her mother since time immemorial, perhaps ever. "I can take myself. I promise."

Tarella looks into her daughter's eyes for a long moment, as if to search out the truth.

"Oh, who am I kidding," she says, with a terrible weariness. "I can't tell if you're telling the truth. I can't tell if you'll just run off and do it again. But I guess I have to trust you at some point. Go on, then. Straight to the infirmary."

And she begins to climb back onto the dragon, not even looking back to see if Jarella is heading in the right direction.

\----

It does, and it doesn't, get any easier.

They don't exactly talk to each other, afterwards. They don't even have those ritual sessions of comfort which always came after yet another Hatching.

After Jarella goes off to the Harper Hall, they see each other less and less, although Tarella pulls a lot of messenger duty over there. Jarella thinks it's on purpose, even though her mother doesn't really take advantage of it, like Marri used to use their chance meetings.

Marri visits her, of course. She does it openly now. Jarella supposes it's not that much of a surprise that she wants to keep an eye on her; to reassure her that it's real, that the girl she raised is still alive.

And there's another reason, too, that she's a favoured foster daughter, she realises later.

"Dragons take them from you, don't they?"

Marri looks up at her with genuine surprise. There is a vulnerability in the older woman's eyes - and how old she looks, suddenly - that she has never let Jarella see before. But now both of them are adults, and who else could she ever speak of this with?

"Yes," admits Marri. "I mean. It's not just that. Look at them. When the riders convey their voices, they always sound so innocent. But who doesn't cover up the flaws of one that they love?"

Jarella looks at her hands, uncomfortably. She's a little sorry that she has brought the topic up; she doesn't want to think of it like that, even now.

"And I guess all the things we hear about them - about what they're really thinking..."

"Come from their riders," says Marri. "Who love them. Like..."

And it's clear that she was about to say, _like a mother loves their child_ , but has thought better of it. The unsaid words hang, heavy and silent, in the air between them. The different ways out flicker across Marri's face; she could launch into another common theme, _she does love you really,_ but she knows that she will never win that argument.

"Anyway," she settles on, nervously, "It means we can never know what they're really like. And with those teeth, and those claws, and those unfathomable eyes - I know they change colours, but it's not like a person's eyes, something that has a real range of expression."

"And sometimes they take them from you... more literally," continues Jarella, although now she just feels cruel.

"Yes," says Marri again. "Yes, they do." She sits in silence for a moment, contemplatively sipping her wine. "I know... I know that they protect us. I know that it's necessary. I know that they die bravely, rider and dragon; that they do the right thing..." She considers whether to say the next sentence, but decides to do so anyway; it's in the past now, it's behind them. "But no mother should have to outlive so many children."

Jarella nods, and refills her cup.

It is the last time that Marri visits her at the Hall.

\----

Jarella's good at singing, it's true, but not that good. Not good enough to perform for Lord Holders and Weyrleaders; not good enough to be part of a full-time choir. And she doesn't really want to teach. Other people's children irritate her. But she meets a journeyman at the Hall who she thinks she can tolerate, and who seems to be quite interested in her continued wellbeing; she's not quite cynical enough to call it 'love', but it's enough.

And it turns out her own children are much more tolerable.

It is many years later, in the latter days of the Pass, when an unfamiliar blue dragon comes to her door. The rider introduces himself, and apologises for the sudden arrival, especially with her husband out on the trail; but her mother is critically injured, he says, and might not last the night.

Another Harper's wife, who has come to listen to the gossip, immediately volunteers to watch the children. So she climbs onto the back of the dragon, and tries not to think of falling, as the passenger straps are tightened around her.

For the first time, she drops into cold darkness. It is a little like the hole that she felt inside her, when she knew that no dragon would ever fill it; she comes out of _between_ with her fingers on the buckles of her flight straps, having attempted to release herself mid-jump.

If her ride notices, he says nothing of it.

They land, and she makes her way to the infirmary, as if she had never left. The rock-hewn corridors are timeless, and she is invisible amongst the busy aftermath of Threadfall; the healers recognise her, some of them.

She kneels quietly beside her mother's prone form; taking her hand, trying to ignore the numbweed-soaked bandages she is swathed with. She stays there, still and silent, as the nurses say things like, it will be several hours, she's out with the fellis, if she wakes at all; things like, it's better this way, at least she isn't suffering, but we'll try to have her awake for you before the end.

And the rider of the blue dragon, after he has finished putting the creature away - or whatever you do with a dragon after a long morning's work and an unexpected detour - comes and takes her other hand. Jarella wonders about him; she does not recognise him at all, but most of her mother's lovers had not been so devoted as to spend hours at her bedside.

When Tarella's eyes finally flutter open, they look at each other for a moment; silently contesting over the first words.

Jarella takes the initiative. She knows that she is planning to be cruel to her mother; why not also be cruel to the man who loves her?

"Mother," she says, softly. "Can you hear me?"

Tarella moans, makes small movements; finally she focusses on her daughter. "Mnnh," she mumbles. It's probably 'yes', Jarella decides.

"Did you..." she begins - but no, that's wrong. That's not the question she wanted to ask. "Could you," she begins again, "could you ever be proud of me, mother, even though I don't have a dragon?"

The man stares at her in surprise, almost in shock; that isn't the kind of thing he expected to hear. But it burns within her. She needs to know. And this could be her last opportunity.

"I..." groans Tarella, with great effort. "Jarella," she sounds out, slowly. "Jarella, I'm... I never... oh Faranth, I'm a terrible parent." She breaks off for a moment, makes a strange motion which might be a weak attempt to cough, and her face contorts in pain for a moment; then her gaze becomes stronger, and her voice sounds more like her when she speaks again. "I couldn't be proud of my left toenail, Jarella. Don't measure yourself by me."

"Love," says the man, unable to contain himself any longer. "Stay with us. You're stronger than this."

She winces again. "Must I, dear?" she asks, trying to arrange her face into a smile, although it seems to not be completely obeying her. "It does hurt ever so much. And I doubt I'll be in the air again - " she stops to convulse slightly, again panting as if she is trying to free up something in her lungs that will not come, " - before the end of the Pass."

Jarella can't take any more. She stands up, towering over the patient, her mother looking small and weak and pale in her infirmary cot. "You are more than your dragon," she insists, fists balled, trying not to shout. "You have people who love you - at least one person, you're looking at him - and things you can do, and... you don't have to fight Thread to have a purpose in life. Or was that not what you tried to teach me, when you caught me?"

The man looks taken aback, and somewhat confused. It doesn't look like Tarella had informed him of that particular episode in their history.

Tarella is already helpless and prone, but she bunches up and shrinks into herself even further, looking suddenly so old - how did she get to be old, while Jarella wasn't looking? But she gives no answer, and not because she has lost the gift of speech again.

"Stay with me," the man repeats. "Stay with us."

"I'll," rattles Tarella, something definitely not right with her breathing. "I'll do my best."

And Jarella leaves her side, and goes for a meal in the dining caverns; there, she finds one of her foster-sisters, and asks for a ride home.

She makes non-committal noises to her neighbours, when they ask her for the news. It's early days yet, she says, but she thinks that her mother will pull through; that's why she's back, because it's more important that she is there for her children.

The regular couriers that travel between Hall and Weyr start bringing her notes from him; notes that cover the progress of Tarella's recovery; notes that try to involve her in their lives.

She does not reply to them, and eventually they stop.

\----

It does, and it doesn't, get any easier.


End file.
